This summer:  David appeared at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.   It was a world premiere of an Allen Cole musical titled 'The Wrong Son' and he played the lead role of Ryle Rawlins.  The show ran from September the 19th to October the 7th.

 Latest from Maria - thank you!

[click of thumbnails for full size photos]  

National Post

She's got Finklepeople sewn up
Susanne Hiller, Weekend Post

Published: Saturday, February 25, 2006

Jenifur Jarvis has her work cut out for her. She's the wardrobe mistress
for At the Hotel, the six-part CBC series that begins on March 7. What
makes it challenging is that it involves dressing the 200 actors who
play the staff and guests at a metropolitan boutique hotel -- quite a
large cast for any miniseries.

But what elevates her job from challenging to well-nigh-impossible is
that the writer-director of the series is the irascible Ken Finkleman. A
case in point. He loves women in white shirts, he hates them in velvet,
the point (well, two points) here being that he is hard to predict and
that his mind is hard to change. Another case in point. At about 8 p.m.
on a recent Friday, he suddenly decided a scene needed a fedora. At that
hour, all she could find was a bowler. He rejected it.

Written by Finkleman, Ellen Vanstone and Morwyn Brebner, the series
tackles -- in the words of the publicity machine -- "Murder, mayhem,
true love and 24-hour room service," and is being billed as a
comedy-drama-satire with music and dance and, oh yes, different time
periods. The characters, naturally, are classic Finklepeople, which is
to say, complex and troubled.

And it's Jarvis's job to make each of them camera ready yet authentic.
There is a faded rock star, drug-addicted hotel owner, washed-up
comedian, romantically inclined chambermaid, opera singer who has lost
her voice and a couple of adulterous wives -- to name but a few.

So each morning over several months, Jarvis was on the set by 7 a.m. to
help dress the cast, a veritable who's who of Canadian actors -- and to
defend her wardrobe choices. She spent weeks researching, thumbing
through fashion magazines books and films for inspiration. She has
created a "look book" for each character. She has also prepared a wall
of photos to help her explain to Finkleman and the actors what she is
going for. Do not minimize the difficulty of this: Several years ago, a
female actor threw a shoe at Jarvis after claiming she couldn't get into
the character wearing such inappropriate footwear.

"I have to be here to argue and stick up for it, or change it," Jarvis
says. "I had one of the characters in a velvet jacket and Ken doesn't
like velvet jackets on women. So I had four other crew members behind me
backing me up saying it was so perfect because the character is this
'80s rock star. I just argued it and told him that it doesn't matter
what he thinks, it matters what the audience, who are watching, thinks."

Jarvis got into show business 14 years ago when a friend of a friend
needed an assistant on a horror film. "At the time, I was sewing at
home, making my own weird new-wave clothing," she says.

Over the years, she has learned to pick her battles carefully. With this
assignment, she was dealing with a man known to be obsessive about what
he wants -- as in velvet bad, white cotton good.

Here's how she dealt with him on that one.

"He likes women in white blouses and I'm like 'No, not every woman can
be in a white blouse.' But I give him a white blouse now so I can use
that H&M skirt later. Sometimes, he'll start asking the actors if they
think they are in the right wardrobe. You just have to make stuff up to
convince him. You have to be quick around him. It's actually really fun.
Ken likes to push it a bit. Working with him is great, he doesn't want
to play it safe. And the best scripts I've ever read are by Ken Finkleman."

So while it isn't easy, the complexity he brings to the table is
stimulating. Finkleman, who created The Newsroom, More Tears and Foolish
Hearts, likes to inject high-brow literary and film references in his
work (admittedly, less so in the early years, viz., Airport II and Who's
That Girl?). As a result, Jarvis often consults the Internet to try to
figure out what he is talking about.

"I'm not sick of Fellini films yet," she says. "I like them, but I don't
always get them." With Finkleman, she says, "You just never know what
character he is going to throw out at you and you have to pretend to
know what it is. He was talking about Juliet of the Spirits and I was
nodding, and that night I got out the movie. Sandra [O'Neill] plays an
opera singer and we had huge hats made for her just like Juliet. And
there is one scene where Jenny, a maid, comes down the staircase, and he
wanted it like La Dolce Vita -- the black dress, the gloves, the
sunglasses, so we copied that."

Because he is famously unpredictable, of course, all of this research is
for nought on those occasions when he changes the script or cuts a
character completely. Jarvis killed herself to pull together a costume
for an alien, for example, but the character is now wearing a leather
jacket.

Jarvis is particularly proud of the Prada-inspired '60s-style maid
uniforms she designed. " I didn't want anything too in-your-face sexy,"
she says, pulling a black skirt and white shirt out of seemingly endless
racks of clothes in an Etobicoke warehouse.

During the height of production, she was working 15-hour days, darting
off to the mall, or to rental and outlet stores, sometimes until 9 p.m.,
gathering carloads of clothes, jewellery and accessories ("No, I don't
have a social life. Thanks for reminding me."). The Eaton Centre in
Toronto became her second home, and much of the clothing for the series
was from H&M and Banana Republic -- often reworked with a team of
seamstresses (one particular H&M suit was transfomed into a Chanel-
style
suit, for example).

Jarvis's own wardrobe is colour-coded. She has 35 pairs of running shoes
and during the week I talked to her she had just donated 28 bags of
clothes to Goodwill.

When the series is complete, Jarvis will take a vacation. Somewhere
warm. And she won't go shopping. Not at all.

© National Post 2006 

Prev - Next >>